


Heartlines

by argle_fraster



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Fix-It: s15e20 Carry On, Episode: s15e20 Carry On Coda, M/M, May the fluff be with you, and heal your injured soul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27651079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: Dean pauses outside the door with a hand on the frame, like a prayer. Like both a hello and a goodbye, rolled into one; a forever, maybe, if such a thing exists. Which…well. He supposes it does now.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 62





	Heartlines

**Author's Note:**

> Is this my way of dealing with the absolute SHITE hand we were dealt? Obviously, yes.

He's gotta hand it to Jack—the Roadhouse even _smells_ right. There was always something comforting down in the bare bones of the wood, corralling the wandering souls inside with the scent of pine and lemon cleaning solution.

Dean pauses outside the door with a hand on the frame, like a prayer. Like both a hello and a goodbye, rolled into one; a forever, maybe, if such a thing exists. Which…well. He supposes it does now. Heaven is a strange world opening up, petals in the spring, and maybe he doesn't need to linger at the Roadhouse forever, or maybe he does. Maybe he'll find the strength he needed in the worn wood walls etched with tiny scars: remnants of bar fights, darts gone awry, and hunters trying to one-up each other after too many beers.

Either way, returning to the Roadhouse is coming home. As much as he likes to pretend otherwise, Ellen's joint provided much more comfort and familiarity than John Winchester ever did.

Dean's gaze flicks back over his shoulder in the direction Bobby had pointed at. Mom and…Dad. His chest swells, but he can't determine the point of origin, nor the intended receiver. He decides to work that tangle out later.

After all, he's got all the time in the world.

Ellen's inside with a rag stuffed halfway into a beer mug, Jo perched on one of the three-legged stools. Neither seems surprised to see him. Dean wonders if Heavenly entrances come with some sort of alert whistle.

“'Bout time,” Ellen says, and plops a beer down in front of him without Dean having to ask.

The sight of them pricks hot at the sides of Dean's vision, and it's yet another thing he isn't ready to face yet. It's been a split second, a splintered cough, a splash of red, since he…anyway, it hasn't been enough time. He's still running to catch up with everything, processing a half beat too slow. To mask the surge of emotion, he smiles down at the beer and says, “This really is Heaven, huh?”

Jo needles him in the side with her elbow. It's just as pointy as Dean remembers. “You left us hanging for so long. I'm not exactly _happy_ to see you, but—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean scoffs. He loops an arm around her shoulders and tugs her in, and if he holds her a little too tight, well, he doesn't think Jo will judge him for it. Last time he saw them was an explosion of brimstone and hellhound guts.

Last time he saw them… 

Jo ducks away. The smile on Ellen's face says it all. They get it; they're here, too.

Dean shakes his head. He thought he'd be better at this. Smoother, maybe. Easier to take it all in. He'd been expecting his end around every corner since he was sixteen, but at the end, hell, it still managed to catch him by surprise.

The beer mug is cool beneath his palm. He raises it to Ellen. “To reunions.”

“To reunions,” she echoes, and something in her eyes shines.

***

There's a lake out back. A real lake—real enough, anyway. Heaven-real, whatever that means. Doesn't really matter, since it feels like a real lake. Dean sits by the side of it on the creaking wood of the dock and watches the sun set. He wonders if he's watching the rotation of it down on earth. Does Heaven keep to standard time?

The pinking sky helps something in his chest unfurl. Bits and pieces of his regret start to melt away, until he's limp and relaxed, surrounded by the chirping of crickets. He could get used to this. 

That jerks him back into the present. He _will_ have to get used to this.

Dean presses two fingers absentmindedly to his sternum, rubbing. He'd been making plans back home. Been thinking about what to do, how to move forward. The future had always been some wild, untamable creature, and after Chuck, even moreso, but for the first time, he'd found himself looking forward to it. A bit. The research was always there on his laptop, tabs waiting to be explored after the sun went down, old tomes promising new leads.

He might have figured it out, too. How do you break into the unbreakable void?

No might. He _would_ have figured it out.

Dean frowns across the lake, watching a dragonfly skip across and leave ripples in its wake. Maybe he wouldn't have had to.

Maybe Jack did that for him.

He closes his eyes. This is Heaven, right?

“Cas?” he tries, quiet. Feeble. Shit, even after death, there's a trill of real fear there. What if Cas didn't answer?

What if he did?

Dean licks his lips, tries again. “Cas?”

The only answer is the soft sigh of the night insects in the brush behind him, and once the sky darkens blue and indigo, Dean picks himself up off the dock and heads back to the cabin partially obscured by thick pine trees. _His_ cabin.

He hasn't gone to see his parents yet.

He chooses not to think about that as he readies himself for sleep, for the routine that still feels comforting and familiar, for the flannel pajamas that stretch across his skin and remind him of things he still wants to cling to, just a little while longer.

***

He spends the next day with Ellen, with Jo, with Ash. He visits Rufus and Bobby, reminisces with them, jokes about days spent pretending to be FBI agents and digging graves beneath moonlight. It feels good; it feels _normal_ , and maybe that's why it rings so strange. 

Dean never had easy, complete happiness in life. In death, it's difficult to adjust to. It feels like a fever dream, a djinn trick, something conjured up from the dark recesses of his psyche just to try and use against him.

He still doesn't go to see his parents, and they don't come to him.

He suspects that's something he should spend a little more time thinking about, but he has other things on his mind.

When the sun goes down, a mirror for the life he left, Dean goes to the dock and stares out at the lake. He thinks he can see Cas's handiwork in it: bees hover near the edges, by the wildflowers that have grown tall and willowy. Of course that would be something Cas included. There's not even a purpose to bees up here, yet there they are, buzzing around the dark bloom centers.

Dean thinks he can see Cas's hands on the lake, too, the way the water sparkles. The clarity.

Blue—terribly blue.

Dean misses the color blue.

“Cas? You got your ears on?” But he must not, because Dean doesn't get an answer. Or he's elsewhere, creating again. Once a celestial being, always a celestial being, maybe.

Dean splays his fingers wide, then tightens his hand into a fist. Again. And again.

But Cas never answers.

***

He summons the nerve to ask Ellen about it, finally, bent over the bar as she stacks bottles in the back he doesn't think she'll ever need. 

“Have you seen him?” he asks, and only belatedly realizes he needs to clarify who he's talking about. She might think he's talking about John Winchester.

But she looks at him, sees right through him, and the worry vanishes. Her mouth thins. “No.”

“Never?”

“Don't think he had a reason to come around, not directly,” she says. The ending hangs open.

Dean doesn't latch onto it. He's afraid to push. Sure, it's Heaven, but free will still exists. After all, wasn't that everything they fought for?

He picks at a bit of the wood grain, which has peeled back from a particularly deep notch.

“Dean,” she says.

“Yeah, I know,” he replies. He doesn't wait to hear what she was going to say.

He isn't sure if he's ready to, yet.

***

After what he thinks is a week but is likely no time at all, given that, you know, _dead_ , Dean goes to see his parents.

Specifically, he goes to see his mother, but he knows his father will also be there. It's strange how he almost wishes he wasn't. He's glad to know Mom's happy, of course, but…it burns a bit. It smolders still in his chest, at what things could have been. Might have been.

Mary is happy to see him, but the resigned sort of happy. Dean supposes that makes sense. Your son is dead. Even reunited, there's something there. A sting.

She kisses the sides of his face.

“I'm so proud of you,” she says.

Dean's voice cracks. “Mom.”

“Stop. It was never your fault. It was time.”

He wonders if Jack went to see her. He doesn't ask.

John Winchester lingers on the other side of the kitchen table. Dean doesn't round it to embrace him, but he does nod. It was different when it was temporary. Strange, detached; here, it's forever. And forever suddenly hits in a new way. John wouldn't have approved of Dean's choices.

Dean doesn't particularly want to give him the opportunity to voice it.

He leaves with the promise to return for dinner and takes the long way home, looping in and around of the fields and trees, the flowering brush and the dusty road.

It doesn't feel like home.

Maybe it wasn't supposed to.

***

He can't sleep that night. After a few hours, he gives up and gets up. At some point, he may have to accept that his body on longer needs to sleep, but the routine offers too much right now to abandon. Sleeping feels normal. Usually, anyway.

He goes down to the lake and stares at the fireflies circling lazily over the top.

The atmosphere sighs, tensing around his shoulders. It's waiting for something; it's waiting for _him_.

“I'm sorry,” he says, quietly. “I'm sorry I didn't—I'm sorry I couldn't say anything. Before you…went. I should have, but I just couldn't, I dunno. I couldn't process that fast. Billie was there, and she was coming for us, and you dropped that bomb about making a deal with the Empty, and then everything sort of just kept going. Like a train. Unstoppable.”

He swallows hard. Across the lake, a frog croaks, the sound echoing back at him.

“This isn't Heaven without you, you know? It's not right. It's not…well. It's not everything I want. Not yet.”

Somehow, it's easier to say to the dark. The night doesn't judge, doesn't mock. The shadows curl around him in an embrace, emboldening him. Shit, he should have said all this before he even died. He should have yelled it to the sky until Cas finally heard him. It's what Cas would have done, probably.

Dean's always been a step behind, though.

“Can you just…can you just come down here? Or…up here, whichever. I need you.”

His voice lowers, barely a whisper. “I _want_ you.”

He waits for a long time by the side of the water, and finally returns. His shoes are sodden.

He collapses into his bed, spent. Heaven, indeed.

***

He wakes to fingers against his bicep. Warm fingers. His breath catches in his throat. Will he die again if he doesn't breathe in Heaven? He doesn't need to. It's muscle memory. Staring at the wall, Dean doesn't dare to move, lest the fingers slide free. When they remain after one breath, two, he risks a slight roll of his shoulder.

“You're late,” he whispers to the blankets, the pillow, the wall—his thundering heart.

“My apologies. I…wasn't sure.”

Dean blinks. “About me?”

“I've only ever been sure about you, Dean.”

Dean closes his eyes, counts his fingers tapping out a nervous rhythm against the mattress. Then he opens them again. He's still staring at the wood panels of the cabin walls. “I get it. I didn't give you anything to hold onto.”

“I never needed it.”

“I should have. I wanted to.”

A sigh, though it sounds fond. “Dean…”

Dean reaches over to tangle their fingers together. The warmth between their palms blossoms through his entire core. _That's_ right; that's what Heaven is supposed to be. Warmth. Comfort. Surety.

“Thank you,” he says quietly.

There's a moment of pause before he gets a response. “For what?”

“For saving me. For thinking I'm worth saving. For…” Still hard to get the words out. His throat has closed. “…for loving me enough to die for me.”

“Dean.”

“Will you just let me say it?” Dean huffs out a ragged laugh. “C'mon, I'm dead. I get at least one wish, don't I?”

“With the changes Jack made, I think you get several.”

Ha. Kid always was an optimist, that's true. “Well, I only have one. This one. This is…this is mine, Cas.”

A beat. “What is?” 

“This. You. Us.”

He hears only ragged breaths. Cas, too, it seems, holds onto the earthly routines, even though he needed them for far less time than Dean did. Must be something about the familiarity of it all.

“Cas, it's always been you,” Dean says. He's never meant anything more. The admission almost hurts. “You're it for me.”

“Dean, you don't have to—”

“Don't.” Dean lets go, sits up. Finally gets a look at Cas again, after everything. No trace of black goo. No scars. Just those bright blue eyes, wide and illuminated by the fake-Heaven moonlight. “Don't do that, not now. This is my Heaven, isn't it? So I get to choose. And I choose you.”

Cas's whole face softens. A smile plays at the corners of his mouth.

“I should have done that earlier,” Dean says.

Cas shrugs. There's something very human about it. “Regrets are something you leave at the door here.”

“Right.” That's the truth. Cas is still wearing that trenchcoat, the first one—the one Dean always preferred. But it's still far too many layers for the quiet parts of night. Dean slides off the bed and stands up, reaching for the collar.

Cas's eyes widen, but he doesn't push Dean's hands away. He lets Dean slide the trenchcoat free and fold it neatly on the dresser. He doesn't fight when Dean tugs at his suit jacket, either, just shrugs it free. The material of his dress shirt is snug across his shoulders.

Dean runs his hands down Cas's arms. “Are you really here?”

He doesn't think Heaven would trick him, but still.

Cas smiles. “I'm really here, Dean.”

“Okay.”

He lowers himself back down to the bed, taking Cas with him. It's cramped, but not uncomfortable. Against the wall, Dean can curl around Cas's warmth. It doesn't feel strange to wrap his arms around Cas.

It feels…right.

Finally.

Dean lets out a slow breath against the back of Cas's neck.

“Can you stay?” he whispers.

“Of course. This is Heaven.”

And that means they have all the time in the world.

Dean closes his eyes, sinks into Cas's back. _Finally._

Outside, the moon winks behind a cloud, and Dean is at peace.


End file.
